DBOS: A Dialog-Based Object Query System for Hospital Nurses

Sensors (Basel). 2020 Nov 19;20(22):6639. doi: 10.3390/s20226639.

Abstract

Due to the advance of indoor positioning technology, it is now possible to trace mobile medical equipment (such as electrocardiography machines, patient monitors, and so on) being moved around a hospital ward. With the support of an object tracking system, nurses can easily locate and find a device, especially when they prepare for a shift change or a medical treatment. As nurses usually face high workloads, it is highly desirable to provide nurses with a user-friendly search interface integrated into a popular mobile app that they use daily. For this, DBOS, a dialog-based object query system, is proposed, which simulates a real conversation with users via the Line messaging app's chatbot interface. A hybrid method that combines cosine similarity (CS) and term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) is used to determine user intent. The result is returned to the user through Line's interface. To evaluate the applicability of DBOS, 70 search queries given by a head nurse were tested. DBOS was compared with CS, TF-IDF, and Facebook Wit.ai respectively. The experiment results show that DBOS outperforms the abovementioned methods and can achieve a 92.8% accuracy in identifying user intent.

Keywords: conversational agent; instant messenger; natural language processing; smart hospital.

MeSH terms

  • Communication*
  • Hospitals
  • Humans
  • Mobile Applications*
  • Nursing Staff, Hospital*